This is the eighth letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Walter Jerrold, editor: Works of William Makepeace Thackeray Volume 1. London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1903 [1844].
When William Makepeace Thackeray — whose name strikes many as being totally made up, maybe even a little Dickensian — serialized his first novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, he did it in the same way Dickens would have in the same period. It came out in a monthly magazine, and households would listen to one family member read the installment out loud. That was home entertainment back then.
Reading The Memoires of Barry Lyndon, Esq., as it’s called in its fixed up novel version, I was shockingly locked in for the whole narrative. It’s quite entertaining, and you can see why Anthony Trollope held this book so high, even over Thackeray’s most famous book Vanity Fair.
Kubrick had wanted to make a movie of the Napoleonic wars that didn’t materialize; he pivoted to adapting Thackery’s Vanity Fair, but since that novel is extremely long, he landed on BL. And the resulting film has gone through a dramatic reappraisal from its initial flop.
Barry Lyndon describes himself as an Irish gentleman who conquered Europe, first as a soldier during the Seven Years’ War, then as a gambler, as a brilliant, dashing adventurer whose only mistakes have come from trusting others too much or being undermined by jealous enemies.
Of course, he is in fact a rake, a “course,” “base-born” adventurer traipsing from one dunder-headed escapade to another. He narrates his own picaresque narrative arc with complete self-pity, and without regard to the people he hurts, like his wife whom he oppresses like a Gothic villain. This narrator is very much like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita.
(Then again, I kept thinking while reading that this fiction read to me as a satire of Rousseau’s Confessions.)
And like both of those texts, this one is carried by Thackeray’s style, though naturally in his own 19th century way. There are heat-packing lines that ended up verbatim in Kubrick’s film version:
It was in the reign of George II that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now; and do not the Sunday papers and the courts of law supply us every week with more novel and interesting slander?
It’s an acquired taste these days, but the way 19th century writers like Thackeray strings these phrases together is satisfying just on a rhetorical level. Here is another passage that Kubrick put into the mouth of the film’s third person narrator, delivering a primer on the Seven Years’ War.
It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years’ War in which Europe was engaged; and, indeed, its origin has always appeared to me to be so complicated, and the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning, and so shall not trouble my reader with any personal disquisitions concerning the matter. All I know is, that after His Majesty’s love of his Hanoverian dominions had rendered him most unpopular in his English kingdom, with Mr. Pitt at the head of the anti-German war-party, all of a sudden, Mr. Pitt becoming Minister, the rest of the empire applauded the war as much as they had hated it before.
After challenging an English officer to a duel over his cousin Nora, young Redmond is essentially exiled to Dublin by his extended family, to keep him from causing more trouble. From there he enlists in the British army to fight in Germany, where of course he deserts.
Over the course of his amblings and gamblings he coerces the English Countess of Lyndon into marriage, and he returns to Ireland.
And here I’m going to give another long set of paragraphs, as here Redmond Barry of Ballybarry — now Barry Lyndon, since he’s a “gentleman” — seems to reveal a bit about himself. These reflections of the class conditions of Ireland, the only national people in western Europe to not form a nation-state, provide the psychological backdrop for Redmond’s pretensions to English aristocracy, as a reflection of national dominance.
After having witnessed the splendours of civilised life abroad, the sight of Dublin in the year 1771, when I returned thither, struck me with anything but respect. It was as savage as Warsaw almost, without the regal grandeur of the latter city. The people looked more ragged than any race I have ever seen, except the gipsy hordes along the banks of the Danube. There was, as I have said, not an inn in the town fit for a gentleman of condition to dwell in. Those luckless fellows who could not keep a carriage, and walked the streets at night, ran imminent risks of the knives of the women and ruffians who lay in wait there,—of a set of ragged savage villains, who neither knew the use of shoe nor razor; and as a gentleman entered his chair or his chariot, to be carried to his evening rout, or the play, the flambeaux of the footmen would light up such a set of wild gibbering Milesian faces as would frighten a genteel person of average nerves. I was luckily endowed with strong ones; besides, had seen my amiable countrymen before.
I know this description of them will excite anger among some Irish patriots, who don’t like to have the nakedness of our land abused, and are angry if the whole truth be told concerning it. But bah! it was a poor provincial place, Dublin, in the old days of which I speak; and many a tenth-rate German residency is more genteel. There were, it is true, near three hundred resident Peers at the period; and a House of Commons; and my Lord Mayor and his corporation; and a roystering noisy University, whereof the students made no small disturbances nightly, patronised the roundhouse, ducked obnoxious printers and tradesmen, and gave the law at the Crow Street Theatre. But I had seen too much of the first society of Europe to be much tempted by the society of these noisy gentry, and was a little too much of a gentleman to mingle with the disputes and politics of my Lord Mayor and his Aldermen. In the House of Commons there were some dozen of right pleasant fellows. I never heard in the English Parliament better speeches than from Flood, and Daly, of Galway. Dick Sheridan, though not a well-bred person, was as amusing and ingenious a table-companion as ever I met; and though during Mr. Edmund Burke’s interminable speeches in the English House I used always to go to sleep, I yet have heard from well-informed parties that Mr. Burke was a person of considerable abilities, and even reputed to be eloquent in his more favourable moments.
Amusingly, Thackeray inserted some footnotes by the “editor” towards the end of the narrative, in case readers would think (taking a position familiar to us today) that Redmond is supposed to be a hero. One wonders if these were added only in the novel version.
From these curious confessions, it would appear that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way; that he denied her society, bullied her into signing away her property, spent it in gambling and taverns, was openly unfaithful to her; and, when she complained, threatened to remove her children from her. Nor, indeed, is he the only husband who has done the like, and has passed for ‘nobody’s enemy but his own:’ a jovial good-natured fellow. The world contains scores of such amiable people; and, indeed, it is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance—one of those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott and James—there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry Lyndon is not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader look round, and ask himself, Do not as many rogues succeed in life as honest men? more fools than men of talent? And is it not just that the lives of this class should be described by the student of human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes, those perfect impossible heroes, whom our writers love to describe?
It’s bit of 18th century-style metafictionality as well: a self-aware comparison of the old romances with this modern thing called the novel, and where it is going.
One striking fact from the chapters on Barry Lyndon in the Kubrick biography is that he wrote the screenplay without a collaborator, the only time in the main sequence of films. He ended up going maximum overdrive on pre-production research to make this costume picture.
He was voracious in his search for information, wanting to see everything before he made a choice. He researched painters: Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hogarth, Stubbs, Rowlandson, Watteau, Zoffany, and Chodowiecki. […]
He accumulated a very large picture file of drawings and paintings, ‘guiltily’ torn from art books. These pictures served as the reference for everything he needed to make — clothes, furniture, hand props, architecture, vehicles, etc. ‘The starting point and sine qua non of any historical or futuristic story is to make you believe what you see.’
The hyperreal production techniques are well known: natural light, location shooting, and interiors lit by candlelight, to be captured by Zeiss lenses that had been designed for NASA satellite cameras. There was some cheating though: sets needed massive arrays of candles to fill in more light, and they sucked the oxygen out of the room, and sometimes natural light through a window had to be simulated with studio lights and diffusers.
The results of the movie’s cinematography speak for themselves though. The cliche “every frame a painting” truly applies.
A consummate homebody, Kubrick wanted to film on location within a 35 mile radius of his home in England, but was convinced to go to Ireland. The biography has lot of details of this brief excursion in early 1973. It also meant the production confronted national questions alluded to above.
This was a time of great nationalist unrest ever since the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry/Londonderry, on 30 January 1972, when British soldiers shot at twenty-six unarmed civilians during a protest march, killing fourteen people. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was then at the zenith of its militant activities, with violence occurring across the island of Ireland and the UK. Kubrick had moved the film to Ireland because its locations were perfect for the film. But the IRA had placed Kubrick on its hit list, according to various accounts and biographers, because his movie showed British soldiers on Irish soil.
Kubrick and crew exited the country in 1974.
There was no shortage of pressure and difficulty, but the result was the “visually ravishing” art film that happens to have the Warner Bros. logo before it, that movie buffs have come to adore.
Kolker and Abrams are also right in their reading of the film as “the end of the aristocracy.” Thackeray ends the narrative with Barry’s downfall, which coincides with the rise of the great French Revolution of 1789. The cold yet enthralling world of European feudalism seen here is also decayed and desiccated, not unlike the sterile administrative machine spaces of 2001. “Kubrick emphasized this sense of loss and its sorrows.”